Announcing Honeycomb support for event ingestion with OTLP

Today, AWS announced enhancements for AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry. We’re working with AWS to build in additional support from partners. In tandem with that launch, Honeycomb is announcing support for event ingestion using OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP).

With that change, you can simplify management overhead and configuration by no longer needing to maintain a separate OpenTelemetry exporter.

Using Honeycomb’s OTLP event ingestion with AWS

With support for OTLP, AWS Distro OpenTelemetry Collector can now send events directly to Honeycomb without relying on additional exporters or other plugins. That new functionality reduces complexity, removes the need to maintain additional components, and simplifies configuration.

Before configuring AWS Distro OpenTelemetry Collector to send events to Honeycomb, you’ll need your Honeycomb API key (available here, if you already have an account) and the name of your dataset. The code snippet below is all the necessary configuration.

exporters:
    otlp:
  endpoint: api.honeycomb.io:443
  headers:
  	"x-honeycomb-team":"<YOUR_API_KEY>"
  	"x-honeycomb-dataset": "<YOUR_DATASET_NAME>"

You can use any string for the dataset name. If that dataset does not already exist in Honeycomb, it will be automatically created. It’s that simple!

You can refer to the AWS Distro OpenTelemetry docs for more information.

OTLP event ingestion is available to anyone using OpenTelemetry

We’re happy to announce this new capability in tandem with AWS and Honeycomb is dedicated to supporting the OpenTelemetry ecosystem with all of our partners. This new event ingestion capability is also not just limited to Honeycomb customers using AWS services.

Honeycomb’s support for OTLP event ingestion with gRPC and HTTP/2 means that anyone currently using OpenTelemetry can also stop relying on external exporters. Instead, you can now simply configure your OpenTelemetry collectors or SDKs to send events to Honeycomb directly.

Special thanks

A key reason why the Honeycomb team was able to implement support for OTLP in tandem with the announcement by AWS was due in part to a new AWS Application Load Balancer feature. AWS ALBs now enable gRPC workloads with end-to-end HTTP/2 support. Leveraging that new feature, we were able to accelerate delivery of this feature and make it available to all users.

We’re thankful to AWS for providing features that help us accelerate our ability to deliver features faster.

The new support for OTLP event ingestion should help simplify the infrastructure configuration you need when using OpenTelemetry with Honeycomb. Try it out and let us know what you think.